Bloatware Destroying Android Experience

Akber A Choudhry

Samsung makes beautiful handsets. Can Samsung please stick to doing what they do best? If you were that good at software, would you be latching on to the open-source Android in the first place? And this goes for vendors other than Samsung as well.

I always buy my phones unlocked, so it is not the carrier that is at fault. I am certain it is the device vendor, especially if the apps mostly begin with 'S'! On returning home from buying a shiny new Galaxy Note II, I had to spend half a day Googling which bloatware apps were safe to remove, disabling the ones that could not be removed at all (Android feature?). The other half was spent monitoring background bandwidth usage and disabling it.

This is also a security risk as even I was tempted to 'root' the phones or allow installation of apps from marketplaces other than the Google Play Store. Most users are never going to use a Video Hub or a Social Hub or any other Hub. And now it is becoming more intrusive. Hey, I even did not install Kaspersky Mobile as it did not come from Google.

On the Note II, the default SMS software, the default Internet browser and the default Music player are ALL bloatware. Where's Google in all this? An open software encourages this behaviour, but the marketplace should have some rules, and why can't I remove software that causes no problems when disabled?